Deaf Humorist Lets His Fingers Do The Talking On Stage

The elders roared at Hope`s punch lines, rocking back in their chairs in front of the television set. Hunter, frustrated, could only tug at their sleeves and ask, ``What did he say?``

``I had to wait until he started moving, like Red Skelton,`` Hunter said. Skelton`s clowning and mime were things the family could share. With Hunter, Hope`s words fell on deaf ears.

Hunter, 42, of Lansing, Mich., has lived in silence since contracting spinal meningitis at age 3 1/2. ``I remember hearing some things,`` he said through interpreter Gail Partridge. ``The memory of what they sounded like is gone.``

Yet according to friends, Hunter is a scream--a gifted teller of jokes and stories, a punster, a delight.

Sign language has no equivalent to Steve Martin`s ``Well, excuuuuse me!`` Henny Youngman is a similar mystery; ``Take my wife, please,`` becomes ``For example, my wife.`` But just as those lines pack no punch for the deaf, the sly humor of signing is lost on the hearing. A gesture, a grimace or a minor variation in a symbol unleashes the odd guffaw of those who`ve never heard themselves laugh.

Hunter, director of the Michigan Division of Deaf and Deafened in Lansing, can bring down the house just by spelling a few words or telling an old joke.

``Part of it is his delivery,`` said Dr. Tane Akamatsu, 30, director of the hearing impaired program at Michigan State University. ``He has a certain style. Maybe it`s in his face, or the attitude of his body. I don`t know what it is. But we`ve all talked about Chris.``

Akamatsu says ``talked about`` the same way that deaf friends will tell her, ``I just heard a great joke.`` Other expressions don`t translate so well. The hearing commonly assume sign language is English converted to symbols. The most popular form, American Sign Language, is actually a language unto itself, different from the systems of Mexico, French-speaking Canada or even England. Those who know ASL and also can read and write English are considered bilingual.

Nearly 1 percent of the U.S. population is profoundly deaf. Many in that group combine ASL, in which hand signals stand for objects or ideas, with the manual alphabet, in which fingers are positioned to represent each letter.

The latter is time-consuming and limited in scope, for a typical congenitally deaf adult with a high school education reads at about a 3d-grade level.

``Usually when deaf children are in the most formative years of learning any language, the first three years of life they`re not exposed to one,`` said Akamatsu, who can hear. ``Hearing families don`t know sign. You don`t expect to have a deaf kid.``

The average hearing child begins 1st grade with a vocabulary of 5,000 words, Hunter said. The deaf children of hearing parents might know 3 to 10 words. So idioms and plays on spoken words are lost.

Why does the chicken cross the road? ``To get to the other side``

translates. ``For fowl purposes`` does not.

Long before she learned to sign, Akamatsu talked with her hands. ``People always ask me if I`m Italian,`` she said.

Racing through a conversation in ASL or emphasizing a point to someone who hears, her fingers are almost constantly in motion. At rest, she subconsciously stretches and kneads them, preparing for the next workout.

``People have mistaken me for being deaf. People tell me I look deaf,``

she said. ``I don`t know what that means, but I take it as a compliment.``

If nothing else, it indicates she`s a part of the inner circle, cleared to use the latest slang and make the deaf the butt of occasional jokes. Helen Keller humor made the rounds of the deaf community, too; it got laughs, Hunter said, as long as it came from an insider.

Akamatsu prefers more subtle images. She saw the A.A. Milne poem

``Halfway Down`` performed a few years ago, and several lines linger: ``It isn`t really anywhere. It`s somewhere else instead.``

In ASL, the contrast became ``anywhere`` and ``otherwhere.`` For ``any,`` the right hand began at shoulder level, curved down a vertical plane to the waist and trailed off to the right. ``Other`` was the opposite, with the left hand beginning at the waist, curving toward the shoulder, fading away.

``You wouldn`t switch hands if you were just talking,`` she said. ``This is poetry, so you want to differentiate. There`s a symmetry. In that sense, it`s a visual rhyme.``

Visual puns abound as well, and can be as simple as changing fingers. Held next to the temple, an index finger extended from a fist means ``I understand.`` An extended pinky has come to mean ``I understand a little bit.``

The sign for deafness, which literally means ``ears closed,`` becomes a punch line in another standard about a foundered rowboat. A deaf passenger swims easily to safety. A passenger with impaired hearing struggles, but survives. A hearing passenger sinks like a stone: ``He had holes in his ears.``